


the sky was gold, it was rose

by kairiolette



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-25 18:12:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7542844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kairiolette/pseuds/kairiolette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'm going to practice with my brother’s team,” is Tsukishima's terse response. After a second's delay, whatever small woodland creature controlling Hinata’s brain pulls the levers into hyperdrive. He bounces onto the balls of his feet, his eyes sparkle so blindingly Tsukishima wonders what light source they could possibly be reflecting.</p><p>“Invite me!” he yells, clenching small fists and hopping forward, making a sound effect that Tsukishima can’t quite put to words, but is enough for him to instinctively summon a sneer, nose wrinkled and mouth pulled into a frown. Hinata’s chin points to the ceiling. The people he looks down at, Tsukishima realizes, are few and far between. “Please invite me along. Tsukishima!”</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sky was gold, it was rose

**Author's Note:**

  * For [volleyowlets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/volleyowlets/gifts).



> i hope you enjoyed this dear giftee, i loved writing it. thank you for giving me the opportunity to do so!! ♡♡

When Tsukishima asks himself how it came to be that he has spent most of his summer vacation in the company of Hinata Shouyou, the only person he can blame, despite a knack for finger-pointing and an even greater knack for not caring, is himself.

His kneejerk reaction to spotting Hinata in the konbini by school the first Saturday morning of vacation is to call out to him by name. It’s easily the biggest blunder he has ever made. He chomps down on the inside of his cheek the second it leaves his mouth. He wonders, in the split second of peace he has before Hinata turns his wide eyes on him, where the years of perfecting eye contact avoidance went; when he would run into classmates outside of school and seamlessly evade confrontation with his headphones turned up and a false glance at his phone—he had it down to a depressing, if not exact, science. All wasted on impulse.

Speaking of impulse, Hinata looks as startled as he feels.

“Tsukishima,” he says, slow and round. His eyes flit—from Tsukishima’s sport glasses to his tee, from his basketball shorts to his running shoes to his duffel bag, to the water bottle he’s about to purchase in his hand. And then they go impossibly big, bulging white and wide-pupiled, cast ever upward. The people he looks down at, Tsukishima realizes, are few and far between. “Are you going to practice?”

That first weekend of summer vacation made itself undeniably known through a heat wave, and Tsukishima starts to think the temperature is going to his head. He is en route to practice, rather than holing himself up in his air conditioned room, as he usually does each summer. And he is wondering why Hinata’s out so far from his home on a day off—of course, on the same day Tsukishima leaves his own water bottle at home and has to stop, of course, at the same place. He sighs, and sees the next few moments play out in his head.

“With my brother’s team,” is his terse response. A second’s delay to process, and, clockwork: whatever small woodland creature controlling Hinata’s brain pulls the levers into hyperdrive. He bounces onto the balls of his feet, his eyes sparkle so blindingly Tsukishima wonders what light source they could possibly be reflecting.

“Invite me!” he yells, clenching small fists and hopping forward, making a sound effect that Tsukishima can’t quite put to words, but is enough for him to instinctively summon a sneer, nose wrinkled and mouth pulled into a frown. Hinata’s chin points to the ceiling. “Please invite me along. Tsukishima!”

Tsukishima lets his gaze drop down to Hinata’s feet. Hinata looks down, too.

“There’s a shoe store nearby, just wait a second for me.” His toes wriggle in his sandals. It’s the stupidest thing Tsukishima has heard since—the last time he heard Hinata speak, last week. Tsukishima doesn’t know how he made it by bike with sandals over mountains and dunes and whatever other absurd lengths he scales to get from point A to point B. He’s still going on about somehow finding shoes and socks and trailing along with him to practice when Tsukishima reaches out and presses down on his head. His hand spans the sweaty cowlick at the crown of his head and the sweaty bangs on his brow. It shuts him up like a hypnotic magic word, so Tsukishima endures it.

“I practice with them every weekend,” he boasts, and he doesn't care but Hinata does; from under his hand he looks up, lips parting into an envious circle. Tsukishima doesn’t quite know why he says what he says next. It sets his summer vacation, which would have otherwise been peaceful, into chaos. It also makes Hinata perk up again, like a beckoned chihuahua, and just enough to remind Tsukishima to take his hand back, to get what he came here for in the first place, and then to leave at once. Not before having the last word. “Just wait a week. And try dressing as if you’re an athlete, instead.”

  
  
  


A week passes not quite like seven days’ time, condensed in the way barbecue grills warp and blur the air above them. Tsukishima almost looks forward to regular team practice to start up again Monday, almost, if only to structure and slow time around the timeless heat. He still dreads a sticky gymnasium and breezeless noons, getting soaked in sweat just from being outside and doing so much as blinking. He realizes, shortly after he last saw Hinata the weekend before, that they didn’t decide when to meet up, or where, or if they even really would at all. He envisions Hinata setting up camp at the konbini all night and day just in case, or marching straight to Tsukishima’s house to fetch him or—and this pisses Tsukishima off—not showing his face at all.

Tsukishima thinks: such a short attention span to match a short distance from head to toe. He probably did forget by now. Either way, Tsukishima stops by the konbini though he doesn’t really need to. But when he swings open the door with a jingle of a bell and a gratifying rush of cold air, Hinata stands looking up at the top-shelf chips across the aisle, spinning a volleyball in his hands. He turns around when the door floats shut behind Tsukishima, eyes puffy with sleep but glowing like last time, mouth set in a comically determined frown. He’s not wearing sandals.

“Where’s Yamaguchi?” is the first thing, of all things, that he says. Tsukishima steps in closer to make the downward slope of his sneer even steeper.

“Was he with me last time?”

“No, but—”

“Where’s Kageyama?” Hinata makes a throaty squawk of what must be outrage and horror and music to Tsukishima’s ears. He chucks his volleyball at him, and Tsukishima catches it in front of his chest.

“We’re not a pair!” he yells. Tsukishima swears it echoes as if he screamed it off a cliff.

“And you think Yamaguchi and I are?”

“Duh!” he yells again. Tsukishima wants to ricochet the ball off his upturned, worried forehead a couple of times, pound his twisted expression into something more dazed. Instead he starts to turn toward the exit, not quite glancing back.

“We better stop meeting here, before anyone starts to think we’re a pair,” he mutters. Nothing could be worse, he thinks. The tea-kettle noise Hinata makes tells him he agrees.

“Why would you say that?!” he yells. Tsukishima tosses the ball back at him, aimed at his head—because, he reasons, any lower and he’d have to roll it—and Hinata catches it, too. The store clerk scolds them for horsing around, and with a smile Tsukishima apologizes in a tone he hopes says,  _ the little one started it. _ But Hinata starts to snicker beneath his hand as if he didn’t, and as they leave the shop, Tsukishima’s palm itches to push down at his head again. He decides against expending the energy.

“Next time,” Hinata starts, squeezing his palms against either side of the ball, eyes gazing somewhere distant, somewhere Tsukishima surely can’t see. “I’ll jog here to warm up.”

They trudge through thick heat to get to the train station. Hinata takes two steps for every one of Tsukishima’s. Next time, Tsukishima scoffs to himself, gritting his teeth too hard to say anything quite as biting. This, he thinks, isn’t about to become routine.

  
  
  
  
  


Tsukishima, a weekend later, thinks: famous last words.

Hinata can’t be the person he spends most of his summer vacation with, and volleyball can’t be what he spends most of his time doing. If it were up to him, he’d be in his room, seated in front of his fan with his headphones on, getting a headstart on his homework. Though he supposes it is up to him, and it is of his own volition that he settles—another Saturday, after a week of Karasuno practice and a day of round robins with his brother’s team, dripping sweat—under the shade of a tree with Hinata. The air is so still it feels backwards, heavy, and like it’s moving against them, breezeless.

“Treat me to ice cream, Tsukishima,” Hinata says, voice hoarse after draining his water bottle without breaking for air. He lies on his back beside where Tsukishima sits, his chest heaving and skin slick and sunscreened. Tsukishima presses his own sweating bottle to his cheek, resting his elbows on either of his knees.

“Despite everything, you’re the older one.”  Hinata knocks his knee into Tsukishima, jostling his arm, and then scoots a safe inch or three away. He swings his heels to lean up on the trunk of the tree, resting a wrist on his forehead, staring up at Tsukishima like he’s never blinked before in his life. Tsukishima wants to tear up a handful of grass and sprinkle it over his eyes.

“You have sunburn, already,” Hinata says, scrutinizing him, and Tsukishima feels it. Just under his eyes and at the tips of his ears.

“Because I'm that much closer to the sun than you,” he says. He takes his glasses off, feigns to wipe the lenses on his shirt, though that just smears the inescapable sweat around even more. Hinata tracks the movement like some security camera.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” he asks. He shoves three fingers into Tsukishima’s face.

“How about me?” Tsukishima holds up one, in particular. It must inspire Hinata somehow, because he pushes his own fingers, as disgustingly damp as Tsukishima dreaded, against Tsukishima’s own. Palm to palm, lined up for measurement. If Tsukishima curled his fingers, they’d fold over Hinata’s perfectly.

“Damn you, Tsukishima!” he whines, and curls his sweaty hand into a fist.

“How did you think that would go for you, I wonder,” he says, swatting the small fist away. He holds his volleyball, one-handed, and hovers it above Hinata’s face. Hinata swats him back and sits up. Their arms nudge where they both rolled up their short sleeves, and it’s too hot for that so Tsukishima slouches more and watches the slosh of water in his bottle.

“Even you are having fun,” Hinata says, and smiles like he’s got something on Tsukishima. Tsukishima grits his teeth; they’ll be powder by the end of the summer, he swears.

“Right now? Not really.” He slides his glasses back on, hoping it’ll magnify the glare he aims scorching toward Hinata, the way it might catch sunlight at the right angle and set an ant on fire.

“Playing volleyball! Going out of your way to practice,” he clarifies, needlessly. He grabs the ball out of Tsukishima’s hand and clutches it to his stomach, a silly, sly grin on his shining face, like Tsukishima’s the butt of whatever joke he’s trying to make. “You only look like you ate a lemon half as much as usual, nowadays!”

“Shut up,” Tsukishima mutters. And to diffuse this line of interrogation: “I’d just rather keep winning.”

The temperature rises. Hinata sucks in a big breath and it’s like he’s taking it right from Tsukishima’s lungs. He’s sitting next to a cartoon, he’s certain of it. If he could go back in time he’d say anything else.

“SAY THAT LOUDER!”

A bird in an overhead branch takes flight in a bluster. Heads, of both his brother’s team and total strangers, snap in their direction. And Tsukishima’s hand snaps up, takes Hinata’s face between his thumb and forefinger, and squishes. Hinata has never looked more like a fish before, bulging eyes and slippery skin. He even makes a vague gurgling noise. Tsukishima pinches his him harder for just a second.

Then, just to be contrary, he whispers what he just said, instead of, as Hinata so delicately put it, saying it louder. Hinata starts to look like he has sunburn, too. Tsukishima lets go of his face, wipes his hand on his shorts, stares out at some distant blade of grass.

“That tickled my ear!” Hinata wails, belatedly cursing Tsukishima’s name again. “Don’t say weird things, Tsukishima!”

Tsukishima thinks, leaning back against bark, wordlessly begging for a breeze,  _ that should definitely be my line. _

  
  
  
  


When Tsukishima arrives at the Karasuno gym the next Friday morning for practice, Hinata shouting his name is what greets him in echoes that throb like a headache. 

“Shut up,” Tsukishima says, before Hinata can follow it up, and the rest of the team shakes it off as a normal exchange between the two—because it is, this happens all the time. Hinata looks at him—chin upturned as always— like Tsukishima is supposed to read his mind. Tsukishima might have an idea what his outburst has to do with. But he is not about to try and guess what Hinata’s trying to say. Practice resumes around them, and Tsukishima stoops to fiddle with his kneepad.

“Tomorrow…” Hinata says anyway, trailing off expectantly, as if Tsukishima will finish the sentence for him. The nerve of it almost makes Tsukishima want to burst with some pent up energy of his own. Tomorrow—Saturday—his brother’s team has another practice, as they always do, open for Tsukishima to join. And Tsukishima, somehow, against all good judgment, had indirectly extended the invitation to Hinata, maybe for the whole summer, maybe even beyond that.

Tsukishima presses down on Hinata’s head, where his hair makes a swirl. Yamaguchi might have figured out the time he has spent with Hinata, but he’d rather not let anyone else in on it.

“Idiot,” he says, and lets Hinata go. Hinata bounds away aggravatingly content, smiling and preoccupying himself, effortlessly, with something else.

“That's surprising,” Yamaguchi says, coming up from behind Tsukishima with little warning other than that’s just where he always is, “You're friends now, Tsukki?”

“Not,” he says, louder and quicker than he meant to, “really. All I do is tell him to take it down a hundred notches, or so. He never listens. He’s been following me around lately, like some hungry stray cat. He’s,” he lets his head loll back, stretching his neck and shoulders stretching as if to prepare for future tension while he looks up at the ceiling, “the bane of my existence.”

_ I play better when his needle-point demon’s gaze is breathing down my neck, so having him around helps, _ is what he withholds. In a backwards way, he vaguely hopes Hinata feels this strongly about him in return. Though, bouncing around across the gym with Nishinoya, there’s no telling if he even remembers the exchange they just had, though he tends to be full of surprises. Yamaguchi remains silent for more than a moment, and that’s when Tsukishima realizes his blunder.

“You bottled all that up, huh?” he wonders. He raises two placating hands when Tsukishima turns to him with narrowed eyes. 

“We're not friends,” he replies, finally. He swallows, and he feels it bob like his throat is fighting it, and he adjusts his sports glasses. “We argue nonstop.”

“A bickering old couple!” Tsukishima doesn’t deign to respond, though his silence is response enough. “Sorry!”

  
  
  
  


Another summer Saturday: early morning scrimmage at Karasuno, late afternoon practice at the university gymnasium. Tsukishima really didn’t want to go to both, but guess who did.

Guess who now staggers beside Tsukishima on their way home, after everything. Even Hinata loses his charge; he stumbles over his feet more than once, and Tsukishima simultaneously relishes and tunes out his pained grunts.

It reminds Tsukishima of a toddler trying to play in the sandbox past his naptime. Hinata, after a few false starts with clumsy hands, unlocks his bike, and Tsukishima rolls his eyes up to the sky, wondering when it became orange with sunset, and when he became so kind. Imagine: local boy collapses in the mountains from heat exhaustion and excessive spiking, from the sheer burnout that must come along as a side-effect of merely existing while being himself. His ever-twitching corpse, feasted on by—

“What kind of animals live in the mountains,” he wonders, thinking predatory felines, or bears, or some Japanese sasquatch. The truth is, he figures, the raccoons would get to him first. Hinata’s peering up at him.

“Tsukishima, I can’t carry you to your house. Are you delirious?”

“Probably,” he replies. Definitely: “You might as well spend the night.”

Hinata wobbles a little harder on his heavy feet, and not for the first time Tsukishima notices how bony his knees are.  _ I bet he snores, _ Tsukishima dreads, recalling, not fondly, the way all his teammates did during training camp nights.

“Tsukishima’s house,” Hinata considers it slowly. “It’s weird thinking of you having a house. Like I used to think teachers slept in their classrooms.”

“What do you think I am?” Tsukishima says. He makes to turn right down the road. Hinata swivels his handlebar to follow, and doesn’t answer.

“Will it be okay with your parents?” Hinata asks instead. And then in a sudden second wind, despite that still summer air, he swings a leg over his bike seat and waddles alongside Tsukishima. “Excited, I’m excited.”

At Hinata’s enthusiasm, Tsukishima begins to second guess all the decisions he has made leading up to this point in time. He wonders how many similar decisions he’ll keep on making despite himself, sinking further into an endless spiral of regret and—sound effects, glowing eyes, hunger. Volleyball, somewhere along they way in that descent into limbo. He wonders when that started to feel secondary to  _ this _ . Either way, he manages to keep up: “My mom is used to feeding someone who has three stomachs.”

  
  
  
  


Hinata stammering through pleasantries and over-polite stock phrases to his mother is as rewarding as Tsukishima expected it to be. What’s less rewarding is how his mother relentlessly turns the teasing on him.

“I’m surprised to see someone other than Yamaguchi-kun at the table,” she says to a defenseless Tsukishima as they move around the kitchen preparing dinner. And then to Hinata: “You must have really warmed up to him!”

Tsukishima had ordered Hinata to sit and wait rather than help out, not out of hospitality toward his guest but mostly because Hinata had been vibrating too much to hold anything without it dropping to the floor and shattering.

“He eats double the amount of nii-chan, so we won’t have any leftovers,” he says to change the subject as he reaches into the cabinet. He hears Hinata start to squeak and splutter behind him, and he stifles a smirk.

“You better run to the grocery store one more time, then!” says his mother.

Hinata chokes around a stuttered  _ that won’t be necessary!  _ but when Tsukishima places a plate and utensils before him, he gives him a sour look typically saved for an obnoxious sibling, tongue sticking out.

After dinner, and after Hinata phones his mother but before they throw their sweat-soaked clothes in the wash, Tsukishima tosses pajamas at him and lets him get in the shower first. He drags out a futon and tosses it on the floor, a few safe paces from his own bed, but close enough that if there is snoring, he’ll be happy to smother it with a pillow.

Hinata returns to his room looking like a misguided squirrel: cheeks and nose pink from the shower, hair darkened and flat, glancing around skittishly, and wearing Tsukishima’s borrowed clothes. He has rolled over the waist of the pants thrice, and the tee-shirt comes down to his knees. He looks preemptively angry at whatever Tsukishima is about to say.

“A dress,” is what it is, and he hides a snicker behind his fingers. Hinata tosses a wet towel at his face, which he snatches out of the air. His overworked tricep tries to fight the movement, he’ll give Hinata that much.

“Shut up, Tsukishi—”  His hollering, louder than even the whirring air conditioner groaning through the vents on the ceiling, gets cut off instantly; Tsukishima covers his mouth with his hand. Hinata’s eyes are bigger when you can’t see his mouth. He drapes the towel back over Hinata’s head, listens to him grumble considerably quieter than before, and then slips out the door.

And he returns to his room after his shower, rubbing the towel over his hair, vision shrouded. “The rule is,” he starts, stepping past the door, “no volleyball talk. I’ve had enough of—”

_ You, _ Tsukishima thinks, when he sees Hinata sprawled on his stomach on top of the futon, one hand under his cheek and the other flung out above him like—like it’s reaching up for some invisible spike, what else. Pathetic. He has the urge to stoop down and pinch his nose until he snorts himself awake. Instead, Tsukishima steps past him to his own bed, and as soon as his head meets his pillow he lets exhaustion win.

  
  
  


It’s five o'clock in the morning, or at least, blearily, Tsukishima thinks it must be, when he hears Hinata yelling his name in a harsh whisper, closer than the position of his futon should have allowed him to be. He pulls his comforter over his shoulders more and turns away from the nuisance, squeezing his eyes shut, hoping to return to nightmares, or, even better, maybe he’ll go back to sleep and never wake up.

“Tsukki!”

Tsukishima’s eyes fly open, a cold sweat springs forth along the back of his neck. A sickly stuttered pound to his heart. He’s still alive. And, speaking of nightmares.

“Scary,” he says, voice little more than a croak. He resents rubbing the sleep away from his eyes, sitting up to look at Hinata despite the protest of his entire body. Hinata, who is, for whatever reason, twitching and crouching at Tsukishima’s bedside.

“Really?” he asks. His eyes are stupidly bright given the pitch blackness of the room, his hair in disarray in such a way that Tsukishima can tell which side he slept on.

“It’s not a compliment,” he says, leaning back against his pillows. He reaches for his glasses on the night table. “What do you want.”

“I don’t know where your bathroom is in the dark.”

Tsukishima lets his head thump back against his pillows. He would count backwards from ten, if he didn’t think that would put him right back to sleep.

“It's not hard to find. You used it, before.”

“What if I accidentally go to your mom’s room?!”  

After a second of exasperation, of considering the aggravatingly legitimate concern, Tsukishima swings his legs over the side of his bed. He feels as though this is all Hinata’s plot—now that he’s awake, he’ll be roped into blocking spikes into the sunrise. He won’t go along so easily, he promises himself this much.

He gets up to his door, not bothering to check if Hinata is following him; he opens it, shouldering Hinata, who looks even more like a middle schooler when tired and in those baggy clothes, out into the hall.

“First door to the right,” he whispers, stooping to that low altitude of Hinata’s, pointing around the corner with a lazy jerk of his wrist. Before he can also tell him that he had better tiptoe there, Hinata shudders; Tsukishima feels the movement against him. They both freeze. Tsukishima can’t really see his face, but he hopes Hinata knows by now what kind of look he’s receiving.

“Thanks,” he squeaks as he hops off, absolutely silent, disappearing around the corner. Tsukishima leaves his door open a crack and trudges back to his bed. Out the window above him, birds chirp. Tsukishima lets himself close his eyes and find patterns in their song conversations—mating calls, actually, he knows, but he doesn’t need to get caught up in semantics at five in the morning. He picks up on a jarring squawk flying closer and closer, ominous.

His door swings open with a muted creak. Tsukishima lies still, pretending to be asleep—he would be asleep, with just a few more seconds of silence, which he knows he’ll forever be bereft of. Hinata doesn’t seem to buy it, or maybe he’s just the type of clueless to talk at someone until they’re reluctantly conscious.

“I feel like running, now that I’m awake.” He gets back down in his squatting position, as if he's stretching rather than settling down. “Or jumping.”

Tsukishima presses two fingers to a temple. It hurts to open his eyes. “Didn’t you hear my rule?”

Hinata comes over to crouch at the side of his bed again. Tsukishima reaches over to place a hand on his head, like he’s turning off a particularly hellish alarm clock.

“Go back to sleep,” he says, then pushes gently backward, sending Hinata sprawling. It backfires; Hinata somehow takes this as permission to scramble up from his heap on the floor and hop up on his bed. His knees dig into the mattress beside Tsukishima's legs as he peers out the window.

“The sun’s already coming up, though,” he says. His face goes orange with it, Tsukishima doesn’t even have to look out the window.

“All the more reason to go back to sleep.” Hinata’s leg nudges Tsukishima’s own, and he cranes his neck until his forehead meets glass.

“It looks really red, right now.”

“Definitely keep staring at it,” Tsukishima says into a yawn. He rubs his eyes under his glasses, then pulls the covers up under his chin.

“You can still see the moon,” Hinata says. He shifts even closer to the window, face pressed to the glass. The bed jostles. Tsukishima sits up an increment, but refuses to follow the skyward point of Hinata’s finger—it’s all reflected on his face, anyway. “Look!”

“I’m not trying to go blind.” He’s trying to go back to sleep. He should be. Just looking at Hinata makes him want to shield his eyes as it is, or take a long, long nap. “I’ve seen the moon before.”

“The moon is,” he spreads hand against window, “like a ball, isn’t it!”

Not one for poetics. It could almost make Tsukishima laugh. But, neither is he. Around Hinata’s fingers the glass fogs up.  Tsukishima squints at Hinata’s illuminated face.

“Where did you go to elementary school?” Tsukishima asks slowly, and after an interval of Hinata staring out past the window and Tsukishima pressing his forehead to the pane. “Your parents should look into suing.”

“Aren’t you the one who tutored me?” he barks in reply. Tsukishima shuts the blinds instead of engaging with anything more than a sleep-deprived glare. Hinata pushes back from the view and flops down on the mattress beside him, and Tsukishima holds himself still, rejecting any impulse to shove Hinata off the bed, because he’s not the one here with impulse control issues.

“Huh,” Hinata says, and Tsukishima shifts so their shoulders aren’t touching. It means having to turn half on his side to face Hinata, and not the opposite way, because he does not trust him enough to turn his back. “I like this position.”

He lifts his hand, presses the palm of it flat against the top of his head, and then drags it in a straight, even line until it lies flat on top of Tsukishima’s hair. Swallowing doesn’t come quite as easily as instinct in that moment. It’s all too sour, probably.

“The only time we’ll ever see eye-to-eye,” he says. Hinata withdraws his hand. His nose is level with Tsukishima’s against the pillow. “In more ways than one.”

“I’ve been getting growing pains lately, just you wait!” Then his expression changes—he smiles crookedly, in a way he might think of as clever, but it makes Tsukishima want to push at his face until he can’t see it anymore. “Did you already forget what you said, Stingyshima? About how you want to keep winning? Back at the gym, the other d—”

“You can't hold that over me,” he interjects. It feels as though there is a migraine, more overwhelming than his desire to sleep, just at the edge of his consciousness. And there’s also one right in front of him, solid in his own bed. He rubs his eyes again, sees bright orange even when he presses at his eyelids. “That's something I said of my own volition.”

“Volition,” Hinata says.

“Because I wanted to.” He knocks a knuckle against Hinata’s forehead to check if it's hollow.

“I still think you should try screaming it,” Hinata says.

“Not sure if I have your lungs,” Tsukishima says, “Or your sound effects.”

Hinata scoots up a couple of inches on the bed. His cheek drags against Tsukishima’s pillow.

“This is even better,” he says, and to see his needlessly smug face, Tsukishima has to look up. It’s exhausting, and it throws everything off balance.

Hinata reaches his hand up and Tsukishima sees it but doesn’t intervene. He flicks his glasses up and off kilter, the bottom of the frames catch on his forehead and one of the legs slips out from behind his ear and Tsukishima thinks,  _ I should have stopped that. _ Hinata again tries to snatch his hand back but Tsukishima snatches it first; he squeezes his fingers until they bunch up in his fist, and Hinata draws in a gasp. Tsukishima’s about to tell him he’ll lose his pinky the next time he tries that, and Hinata’s probably about to ask him how many fingers he’s holding up with his other soon-to-be pinky-less hand but instead… Instead, no sound comes from either of their mouths, and what happens makes as much logical sense as the moon being a volleyball.

Some force of gravity pulls them in to kiss. And then breaks them apart for a breath. Hinata smells purely of shampoo, this close. His panting comes out hot against Tsukishima’s chin, his fingers scrabble at his shoulders for purchase, though neither of them are falling.

"Oi, Tsukishima,” he says, his voice a scratch, his temple brushing against Tsukishima’s cheek, “You're not gonna kick my ass, right?"

“The world doesn't revolve around you, you know,” Tsukishima replies. As if Hinata is the only person in this room. As if it only happened for him. He pushes his glasses up off his forehead, releasing Hinata’s hand, which he had still been squeezing. Hinata pulls back to look down at him again, lips parted, almost tauntingly.

“So that was of your own volition?”

Tsukishima knows this feeling in his stomach but hardly understands it, doesn’t see where it starts and ends, doesn’t want to name it, and doesn’t seem to be able to bottle it when the object of it, the catalyst, is less than centimeters away. Maybe it is volition, maybe not just his own, maybe some mysterious force of gravity or some unfortunate malfunction of puberty—a fluke. He wants to quiet Hinata’s mouth with his own, push the top of his head down and tangle his fingers in something, run a hundred miles, be gentle.

“Yes,” he says. He finds his chin tipping up again, and Hinata sliding back down close to him.

“Take the blame for this one, too.”  Hinata’s voice is rougher than Tsukishima’s ever heard it, there’s a snide or stern remark he can make but something else is on the tip of his tongue. He’s being kissed again. Hinata’s heavy eyes fall shut, like he could fall asleep doing this. His mouth is soft suction, and it’s wet, and silent, and everything Tsukishima should be unfamiliar with, but he still chases after it.

“It's not surprising you're terrible at this,” Tsukishima says when they pull back for another breath, ragged in the silent room. He closes his eyes when the room spins, bites the inside of his cheek when he realizes he’s the one breathing heavier. Hinata’s nose nudges against his own, and he makes a small noise as their lips meet again and again in sluggish rhythm, but he doesn’t protest. Imagine, there is a way to shut him up, and it's this.

  
  
  


The next time he wakes up, it’s noon. The muscles along the underside of his thighs are cramped from holding still through the night, because, lest he forget, there’s another boy in his bed. The same restraint doesn’t seem to have spread to Hinata, who is warm where his arm rests thrown over Tsukishima’s hip and where his ankle rests somehow hooked over his knee. The rest of his body is a twitch away from sliding off the edge of the bed and collapsing on floor. So Tsukishima grabs his shirt— his shirt—and drags him closer. But this rouses Hinata—a flutter of eyelash, a wrinkled nose and furrowed brow, then he realizes where he is, who is in front of him, and his face, miraculously, slackens.

He has that supernatural look to his eyes; Tsukishima can’t guess what’s going on in Hinata’s head, because he doesn’t know what’s happening even in his, but they are silent. He has his fist clenched in his shirt, and they might be about to draw closer, like they did the night before. This truce is snapped in two and maybe irreparable, because he hears his mother shuffling outside and is honed down to earth. In a wake-up call panic, he shoves Hinata bodily off his bed.

And just in time; his mother opens his door and peers in: Tsukishima looks blissfully relaxed and freshly awoken, Hinata looks like he was wrenched sweating and muttering and only half-on his futon out of a nightmare. Politely, his mother pretends not to notice.

“You two stayed up late last night,” she teases, but it translates to,  _ noon’s really pushing it.  _ Tsukishima puts on his glasses.

“We’ll be out in five minutes.”

“Alright,” like she doesn’t quite believe it, but she closes the door behind her. After she does so, Tsukishima peers over the edge of his bed.

“Good morning,” he says, saccharine. Hinata grabs him around the collar and pulls himself up, bringing his contorted face in close.

“You're the worst,” Hinata spits back. He looks like he’s about to start hollering at Tsukishima. Maybe neither of them intend for it to happen, but it does, catastrophically: another kiss. Tsukishima sighs out his nose. Morning breath. All this couldn't possibly get grosser, and then it did. Hinata licks his lips and smacks them when they pull apart. He has sleep in his eyes, but his hands are too busy balling Tsukishima’s collar into fists to wipe it away. “So that wasn’t a dream.”

“Idiot. Did you really think it was.” He grabs Hinata around his wrist to get him to loosen up his grip on his stretched-out collar, but Hinata doesn’t make to let go. “If anything, it would have been a nightmare.”

Hinata just lifts his chin up again. His resolve weakens so easily when they kiss, and his whole face opens, right there, when they pull away. He drops back down to the floor in a heap, and Tsukishima nearly follows him; he plants his hand next to Hinata’s head, holding himself up. This dizzily close, he can see the way Hinata’s throat moves when he swallows. He can hear his labored breathing echo his own.

“Is this what the rest of the summer’s gonna be like?”

Tsukishima can hardly field questions like that, spoken low-lidded and curious, the breath of the words against his own lips. So he quiets Hinata the best way he knows how—until they’re both on the floor, Hinata’s elbows locked around the back of his neck, mouths utterly preoccupied, five minutes turning into thirty—and thinks: this is answer enough. After that, he doesn’t think much at all.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://kairiolette.tumblr.com/post/148405430667/the-sky-was-gold-it-was-rose) | [twitter](http://twitter.com/rachethyst) :)


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